Have you ever used fortune? Or how about cowsay (or for that matter, have you even heard of it?) . If you haven’t heard of them… well, you’re missing part of your Linux experience.

Fortune (or fortune-mod), is a program that prints out random quotes/funny things on the console — it is IMHO essential to have in ANY linux system, especially if you run it on login. Cowsay is a program that prints out the text passed to it in a bubble, with a cow illustration. Its extremely amusing.

Anyways, I combined fortune and cowsay awhile ago in a script that randomly selects a different cow and cow type to display the fortune, and I have it installed in my /etc/bash/bashrc file. Heres an example of some output from it.

 ________________________________________
( Do you know the difference between     )
( education and experience? Education is )
( what you get when you read the fine    )
( print; experience is what you get when )
( you don't.                             )
(                                        )
( -- Pete Seeger                         )
 ----------------------------------------
        o   ^__^
         o  (@@)\_______
            (__)\       )\/\
                ||----w |
                ||     ||

Enjoy! http://www.virtualroadside.com/download/rndsay.tar.bz2

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 9th, 2007 at 12:51 am and is filed under Linux. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.